mattcmhttp://www.mattcm.com
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 20:36:27 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.16mattcmhttps://feedburner.google.comCould you live with this lot?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/WBlNcOiO24o/
http://www.mattcm.com/could-you-live-with-this-lot/#respondSat, 02 May 2015 13:28:06 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=699Sometimes pictures can say it far better than words…

Thanks to the amazing people at Dare for all their hard work with this.

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/could-you-live-with-this-lot/feed/0http://www.mattcm.com/could-you-live-with-this-lot/Vote for Policies 2015 is live!http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/oZacCNuhA38/
http://www.mattcm.com/vote-for-policies-2015-is-live/#respondFri, 20 Feb 2015 20:49:06 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=663After a few months of hard graft from agency UVD we’ve gone live – and it’s great to see the service up and running.

In the first day, over 30,000 users did the survey and we’ve had loads of feedback, so we can make some tweaks before really kicking off the marketing campaign in mid March when election fever starts to warm up.

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/vote-for-policies-2015-is-live/feed/0http://www.mattcm.com/vote-for-policies-2015-is-live/You don’t have to build software to be Agilehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/yM63X2pgViw/
http://www.mattcm.com/you-dont-have-to-build-software-to-be-agile/#respondThu, 30 Oct 2014 13:12:02 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=654The last few years has seen Agile become the de-facto delivery approach for technology firms. That is, product teams have started using Agile methodologies to organises their teams of software developers.

Agile isn’t actually a thing in itself – it’s an umbrella term for a number of methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, or Feature Driven Development. During my time at reed.co.uk we used Scrum for product development and Kanban for anything that needed faster response times.

What all Agile methods have in common is their adherence to the values and principles in the ‘Agile Manifesto’ (yes, it’s a real manifesto – here it is) which, in simple terms, is different to traditional project management because it focusses on things like;

Collaboration

Early and regular delivery

Highest business value first

Continuous improvement

Responding to change

I’ve been making a series of presentations to teams across the business to give an idea of the simplicity of the Scrum framework. I think it’s helpful to understand why it’s a framework and not a process – it’s different describe how it provides some ‘rules’ for behaviour (like planning and reviewing) while leaving freedom in other areas for teams to decide things for themselves (like how to actually deliver the work).

I think it’s also important to understand that you don’t have to develop software to use Scrum, or any other form of Agile. It can be useful for any teams – in fact anyone who simply wants to do more of something, and get better at it. In a business context that could mean acquiring more leads, setting up more sales appointments, managing more customer service requests, producing more content, delivering more campaigns, reducing debtors, or even managing the strategic direction of the company.

With this in mind I have curated a few Agile case studies for non-technical teams that I hope will give you ideas as to how Scrum or Agile can help you. If you have any questions or want to take some of these ideas forward, feel free to get in touch.

Personal Kanban is becoming popular where I work and a few people (including me) run their own personal kanban boards to organise their work, improve focus and get more done. I use Trello as it’s very lightweight but you can use JIRA and a whole array of others too. If you want to know more try the Persoanl Kanban site or this blog post.

And finally, if you want to know how far some people incorporate Agile into their lives, the Scrum Alliance had some interesting responses to the following tweet:

So you practice #Scrum in your work life, but do you do anything to practice it in your home life? #Agile

Responses include everything from DIY to organising holidays to planning a wedding! You can read the responses here.

Hopefully this gives you some food for thought and a bit of encouragement to look into how Scrum or other Agile practices could help you and the teams you work with.

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/you-dont-have-to-build-software-to-be-agile/feed/0http://www.mattcm.com/you-dont-have-to-build-software-to-be-agile/We did it! Over 900 backers for our successful crowd funding campaignhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/Og0EEe13ky4/
http://www.mattcm.com/we-did-it-over-900-backers-for-our-successful-crowd-funding-campaign/#respondSat, 06 Sep 2014 21:02:05 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=668There were moments when I thought we weren’t going to make it…but the last few days saw an incredible push from our supporters to bring us way over the finish line – our aim was for £20,000 and we made a whopping £23,551. http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/voteforpolicies

We’ve had such amazing support for our campaign since we began and now the work begins to bring back Vote for Policies for 2015, fully mobile friendly, with better design and capability to handle large traffic.

We’ll also be adding Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to the survey and organising a marketing campaign to reach an ambitious but potentially game-changing 5 million people. Our aim is to help voters really engage with what parties promise to do, as a first step towards holding politicians to account. Step 1 is an engaged electorate – step 2 is to develop a service that tracks the actions of our elected government against their election promises.

Thank you to everyone who supported the campaign. The short film below shows me explaining what we’ll do with the money and why it’s so important.

A sustainable democracy is transparent, accountable and representative. We can change ours by voting for policies at elections – and not personalities.

A sustainable democracy adapts to the changing demands of an active electorate. In a sustainable democracy, we would expect to see voter turnout rates consistently above 80%, and the popularity of policies would reflect the balance of power of the parties. Does that sound radical? I don’t think so.

The magic ingredient that a sustainable democracy has that other democracies don’t is a high degree of transparency. More specifically, a high degree of transparency in three vital areas: vision, policies and performance. Only when transparency is achieved in all three can a democracy become sustainable, restoring power back to the people, and making the government truly accountable. It’s a simple idea, yet for all the democratic privileges we enjoy over other nations, it’s still a long way from describing our current process.

The idea of Vision – declaring the kind of society that we need, and why, in order to thrive – doesn’t feature in political discussion. The simple reason is it kills votes. Politicians won’t disclose their vision for society because they fear voters will disagree with it, and because knowing the broader context of a policy can easily reduce its appeal. For example, while you might support outsourcing NHS services in the name of better care provision or cost-cutting, what if you knew the ultimate goal was to replace the NHS with a private health system – would you support it then? For politicians eager to get into power and stay there, having a vision is too risky. But without a vision, how can we vote for the policies to achieve it?

Policies, however, are part of everyday discussion in the media. This would be a good thing if it wasn’t so difficult to keep track of them. The media sways from one hot topic to the next, and parties announce policies without any real schedule or consistency. The bigger parties have manifestos but they certainly don’t promote them, and come election time they’re overshadowed by personality battles, party bickering and media spin. As a result, how many of us know which policies belong to which parties? For those of us that make it to the ballot box, do we really know what kind of change we’re voting for?

And what about transparency in government performance? In the run up to an election, there is no meaningful way to compare what our elected representatives have achieved against what they promised (including coalition agreements). We get different views through the eyes of different media organisations but we don’t get a clear, independent and unbiased view of it all. As long as we can’t measure their performance, the government can’t be accountable to it. And until our government is fully accountable, we won’t truly own our democracy.

So where do we start? How do we make vision, policies and performance more transparent, and in so doing make our democracy sustainable? In my view it’s simple; certainly not easy, but it is simple – and without question it is achievable. Here’s where to start.

Vote for policies

Until we know what a party stands for – the policies it promises to support – there is no point thinking about its track record or whether we like its leader. Sure, once we have an idea which party’s policies we prefer, considerations like credibility, track record or even chances of winning the seat become relevant to our decision making process. But only after we know what the policies are. Policies are what create change, so whichever party we decide to vote for, unless we know what its policies are we won’t know what kind of change we’re voting for.

This is exactly why I set up Vote for Policies. It’s a free service that makes it easy for everyone – regardless of age or level of political interest – to compare policies in a rational way, without bias from the media or our own preconceptions, and to use that information to make an independent decision about which party to vote for.

Don’t we need a vision first?

Yes, having a more transparent political vision remains a vital cog in making our democracy sustainable. I’d like to see more honest and open discussion about what kind of society our parties want to create now, but given the risk to politicians and the current low levels of engagement with politics, it’s probably not realistic in the short-term. However, by placing more focus on policies and manifestos, we are taking the first step towards achieving it.

With greater transparency of policies, and by focusing our political debate around them, it’s much easier to extend the discussion to vision. Not only because it tells parties we are paying attention to what matters, but it’s a simpler, less spin-able conversation that makes politics more accessible to a wider cross section of society which will create more demand for clarity from political manifestos.

What about accountability?

There’s an understandable argument that there’s no point focusing on policies because politicians don’t keep their word – manifestos aren’t relevant because governments aren’t accountable to them. So how do we make them accountable?

The idea of making manifestos legally binding will always get an enthusiastic hearing among some voters, myself included, but it’s too obviously a noose in which politicians won’t be placing their heads any time soon – and certainly not those already in power. But if we start by focusing on policies, we’re creating an implicit level of accountability by making it clear to our political parties that we’re paying attention to what they’re promising. From here it’s much easier to make a stronger case for further changes, so we’re also creating a platform for greater accountability in the future.

If we want to create a sustainable democracy – where politics is accessible to all, where we can debate the vision and policies for a society that will meet the challenges we face and where our government is accountable to its performance in a fair way – then we must create greater transparency. By starting with policies, we are taking the biggest leap possible towards achieving this, and at the same time starting to turn the cogs for even bigger change to come. The best thing of all is we can do it ourselves, and we can do it now.

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/to-create-a-sustainable-democracy-we-need-greater-transparency-on-policies/feed/0http://www.mattcm.com/to-create-a-sustainable-democracy-we-need-greater-transparency-on-policies/Factshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/IOsNyaq1kpQ/
http://www.mattcm.com/facts/#commentsWed, 13 Mar 2013 01:47:46 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=589If you’re one of those people who tends to let the facts get in the way of your opinion, you’ll find this interesting.

This is how much we actually spend on Housing Benefit, Incapacity Benefit and Jobseekers Allowance – as a percentage of the UK government’s total spend.

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/facts/feed/3http://www.mattcm.com/facts/Four ways to scale your social enterprisehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/qreFAPyrVeQ/
http://www.mattcm.com/four-ways-to-scale-your-social-enterprise/#respondWed, 06 Mar 2013 09:24:22 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=575Something for all my social entrepreneurial friends out there. It’s Bill Shore of Share Our Strength, giving his ideas for how to scale up your organisation (or just keep going) and break out of reliance on the usual funding model. The talk was at TEDxMidAtlantic Be Fearless.

There are some brilliant ideas here – may not resonate instantly for everyone’s business – but for me this kind of thinking is essential if we’re to find the level of scalability that the social sector so desperately needs. I have summarised Bill’s points below – mainly for my own purpose of recollection, but also as a starter for a longer post containing more business model ideas – but watch first and see for yourself…

Measure by impact (not admin overheads) – be accountable to specific objectives. Corporates may be more receptive than funders to a bigger vision and a plan to achieve it.

Social entrepreneurship needs a public policy component – it gives you voice with which to scale your work.

Collaborate, but compete too. Compete to be the best provider, to use the best resources, to be the best version of ourselves.

Finally, I also recommend the Case Foundation’s Be Fearless website – it has a really great message for social entrepreneurs (as well as offering a master class in UX!).

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/four-ways-to-scale-your-social-enterprise/feed/0http://www.mattcm.com/four-ways-to-scale-your-social-enterprise/What can digital do for politics? Just ask the userhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/W5r1t4YzMtg/
http://www.mattcm.com/what-can-digital-do-for-politics-just-ask-the-user/#respondFri, 23 Nov 2012 17:58:08 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=545

Summarising our group’s thoughts on digital

A few thoughts from the Parliament Week event put on by the RSA entitled ‘Do We Get The Politics We Deserve?’. The main event was a panel discussion with author Matthew Flinders, Gloria De Piero (MP for Ashfield) and Nadhim Zahawi (MP for Stratford-on-Avon, and founder of YouGov). There then followed some mini-workshops, one of which I facilitated.

You can get the low-down of the whole event on Storify, but there were some interesting outcomes from my workshop. The question asked to my group was ‘Can digital help improve our politics for the better?’, and it was really encouraging to see the attendees flock overwhelmingly towards this subject (and not just because my corner was nearest the wine).

Now, we should bare in mind that this group was not scientifically picked and included people whose attendance suggested a certain engagement with politics. That said, there was a fantastic range of ages, political preferences, and digital experience, and it was really heartening to hear so much opinion so willingly offered. And personally, as a creator of digital services, I was also reminded just how important (and how easy) it is to get feedback from users when trying to solve problems.

The outcome? In short, the response was an overwhelming Yes – digital can help improve our politics for the better. But many in the group were not without their concerns. Specifically;

Digital services must be easy to use – designed for all levels (this was a bug-bear for almost everyone in the group and regardless of age!)

Digital services needs the same credibility to compete with established channels (especially surveys, for example).

And if we address those concerns, what can digital offer our politics?

It allows us to change the narrative (away from politicians’ to to one of our own)

Digital is brilliant for reaching / engaging young people and first time voters.

OK, so nothing ground breaking you could argue, but in a 15-minute session I was impressed with the enthusiasm and thought that came back – especially as the workshop was only an add-on to the main panel discussion. All in all it was yet another welcome reminder about the value of participation: from focus groups to feedback forms – don’t forget to ask the user.

]]>http://www.mattcm.com/what-can-digital-do-for-politics-just-ask-the-user/feed/0http://www.mattcm.com/what-can-digital-do-for-politics-just-ask-the-user/Patchwork – technology working for changehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/mattcm/~3/YWM950fz3So/
http://www.mattcm.com/patchwork-technology-working-for-change/#respondSat, 03 Nov 2012 10:51:56 +0000http://www.mattcm.com/?p=525Every now and then you see something so inspiring that you just need to share it. Patchwork is one of those things. Designed by the team at Futuregov, it helps practitioners across multiple agencies access the contact details of other front line staff working with the same clients – improving communication and strengthening collaboration.

The idea started developing after the Baby P case, and was designed in close collaboration with the practitioners it aims to help. It’s a brilliant example of how useful technology can be – helping practitioners do what they’re best at by giving them access to better information – not by replacing human connections, but by supporting them.

And it’s a great example of how you need to get under the skin of a problem to really understand it, learning from those who experience the problems every day. This is something Futuregov seem to have done brilliantly, and I hope the results will come in the widespread adoption of Patchwork across may other local authorities.

Watch the video below or have a look at the Patchwork website. Inspiring stuff, so do spread the word.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of taking part in Undoc Camp, looking at ways in which digital can help solve problems faced by undocumented migrant youths.

The event was organised by On Road Media, who expertly brought together people from the legal, digital and migrant sectors and, crucially, young migrants who have experienced first hand the issues we were addressing. We were divided into teams, with each team given an issue to work on.

The camp has been written about in more detail here, so for this post I just want to offer a few of the observations and learnings I took away with me.

Recognise the limitations of digital as well as its potential. What became clear from listening to those experiencing the issues as well as the legal professionals, was that it would be dangerous to try to recreate the relationship between solicitors and migrants. Digital can’t replace the complexities of human communication, but we can use digital to facilitate it.

Use what’s there – don’t reinvent the wheel. This was one of many great pieces of advice from Carrie Bishop, who spoke to the attendees on Friday evening. Some great ideas emerged the following day, showcasing a considered balance of services already out there and adding any functionality that customised the experience for this particular audience (e.g. the Migrant Map idea). And not a ‘portal’ in sight!

The importance of lightness. Something that Adil Abrar mentioned during his inspiring talk – heavy subjects don’t have to have all the fun removed. His words must have resonated as the groups that showed designs as part of their pitch all reflected this message – focussing the tone on the audience rather than the difficulties they were facing. Within my group, we had a lot of fun and good humour which really helped bring out great contributions from everyone. And being lucky enough to win the main £5k prize from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, I’m sure we will be bringing Adil’s advice to our design approach now that we can actually take our idea to the next stage.

Change happens when we are all motivated by a common cause. No matter what people’s backgrounds and skills, when we are all bound by the same driving force we can work together and create something new. In this case, it was to help young people who face appalling problems through no fault of their own, and who need a better system to help them live better, safer lives.

We can do this. We have the will power, we have the skills, and with events like Undoc Camp we have evidence we can really do it.